Re: role="" attribute

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> At 07:47 25/03/2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > ARIA has a lot of attributes, all but one of which are prefixed with 
> > the string "aria-". Is there any chance we could also prefix role="" 
> > with "aria-", as in aria-role=""? I understand that in some host 
> > languages, the attribute has other purposes as well, but it would be 
> > useful if, in the host languages where that isn't the case, the 
> > attribute was prefixed. It would keep all the attributes together in 
> > indexes and tables in implementations, it would make it easier for 
> > authors to see their accessibility API work, and it would highlight 
> > the link between the various attributes. It would also allow ARIA to 
> > be used in vocabularies that already have a role="" attribute (aria-* 
> > attributes are far less likely to already exist than role="").
> 
> I thought this was because the role attribute wasn't meant to be 
> constrained to WAI-ARIA. The attribute is defined at 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/ (working draft). Is this a proposal to 
> separate WAI-ARIA's use of the role attribute from other uses?

The role="" attribute as used in WAI-ARIA already seems to be split from 
the XHTML2WG's role="" attribute. This was just a proposal to rename it 
for consistency with the other ARIA attributes.

However, it has been pointed out to me off-list that it is too late, since 
we already have numerous implementations of this feature. So please 
disregard my suggestion.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'